Austin-Based Open Labs Partners with Dell, Lenovo, and Others to Launch Stagelight 2.0

Open Labs debuted the first version of their music production and creation software, Stagelight, back in 2013. For you Mac people in the audience, Stagelight is essentially the PC version of GarageBand – a program that allows even the least musically inclined of individuals to create, edit, and mix their own music. Last week Open Labs locked down distribution agreements with Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, and Guitar Center to ensure that Stagelight 2.0 reaches a whole new level of mainstream success.

“Our focus as a company is to make music creation accessible to all people” Open Labs CEO Cliff Mountain told VentureBeat last May. The biggest hurdle he felt that the company faced when creating Stagelight was that so many people lacked the time they felt was needed to become proficient in the product, making it hard to fork out the cash for something they may never get close to mastering. Now a company that boasts over 750,000 customers, it appears they have more than overcome their obstacles by creating an inexpensive, easy-to-use application.

The first version of Stagelight was only offered as a 30-day trial on a few select PC’s, and was available for purchase for $9.99. Open Labs’ new partnerships mean that the full 2.0 version will come preloaded on all XPS 18, XPS 27 and Alienware Dell products, all Horizon and educational Lenovo tablets and notebooks, and soon all Lenovo Yoga II Pro products. These preload agreements coupled with distribution deals with Guitar Center and Microsoft lead some to believe that the estimated 2 to 3 million downloads the company has predicted it could pull over the next few months may be a fairly conservative one at that. There have already been nearly a million downloads of the full app, and it is unclear whether that total includes the Linkin Park and Timbaland versions of the product (both artists currently offer their own music bundles on the platform, and Open Labs hopes to add even more artist bundles over time). Consider for a moment that Lenovo alone sold 6.5 million tablets last year, while Dell moved nearly 37 million PC’s – even if these products are not necessarily making it out to Stagelight’s target demographic, it’s an insane amount of exposure for a fairly new app at the least.

Stagelight 2.0 is available as a free update for registered owners or for purchase for only $9.99. To sweeten the deal, Open Labs has added a few new features that were not included in the initial version. The first is a LoopBuilder feature, which allows amateur DJs to create mashups of different tunes and ringtones from their favorite songs. Also notable is the Key Lock feature added to the Electro Instrument Series, which essentially creates a “piano that can’t play wrong notes”, while a SongBuilder engine provides step-by-step lessons and advanced features.

In a bold statement last week, CEO Cliff Mountain stated that Stagelight is “much easier to use and learn than GarageBand or any other music creation program”. If that proves itself to be true, then the little-music-program-that-could should shoot well past the one million user mark in no time. Currently Stagelight 2.0 is available only for PC, but Mountain hopes to expand that to the Android platform by fall of this year.